Sutton's Law

Biological Parallel

Sutton's Law states 'Go where the money is' (attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton). Optimal foraging theory formalizes this principle biologically: animals should concentrate effort on highest-yield patches, abandoning low-yield areas quickly. Predators don't hunt uniformly across landscapes—they patrol prey concentration zones. Lions hunt near water holes during dry season; sharks hunt near seal colonies. Energy spent searching low-probability locations is energy wasted. Bees demonstrate Sutton's Law with mathematical precision. When a forager finds a rich nectar source, she performs waggle dances encoding distance and direction. The colony's foraging effort concentrates on the highest-yield flowers, ignoring marginal sources. Bees don't sample all flowers equally—they allocate effort proportional to expected return. Patch abandonment thresholds follow diminishing returns: when intake rate drops below travel cost, switch patches. This is Sutton's Law quantified. Cellular resource allocation obeys the same principle. Under nutrient stress, cells don't uniformly reduce all pathways—they shut down low-priority processes entirely (growth, reproduction) to preserve high-priority functions (DNA repair, homeostasis). Bacteria concentrate nutrient uptake transporters at membrane regions facing nutrient gradients. Neurons concentrate receptors at synapses where signals arrive, not uniformly across the cell membrane. Sutton's Law emerges from thermodynamics: uniform effort across non-uniform resources is thermodynamically wasteful. Go where the resources are concentrated.